Patty stared at the ceiling, seeing the white speckled acoustic tiles in negative. The white became black and the dark holes became stars.
She ignored the sounds coming through the open door, just as she ignored the policewoman seated outside reading stuff on a cell phone. She tuned out the noises from the nurses’ station and the small beeps and pings of the machines that lurked around her bed. None of it was entirely real to her.
Patty tried to ignore the pain signals from her hand. Not because she was afraid of pain—that kind of pain was nothing to her anymore—but the pain threw memories at her.
Just not enough of them.
Tuyet.
There was still a ghost of a little girl in her mind. Small, pretty, dressed in a pale-blue dress over darker-blue leggings. There were little white flowers on both. A matched set. A gift from bà ngoại—Grandma—on Tuyet’s last birthday. She was starting to grow out of the leggings but cried every time Patty wanted to move them on.
“They’re my favorites!” wailed Tuyet. “They keep me safe.”
Safe.
The clothes still smelled a little like smoke after fifty washings. Tuyet had been wearing them when the house next door caught fire and then spread to their place. Tuyet had run around waking everyone else up and they all got out safely.
They keep me safe.
When they found Tuyet in the road she had been wearing that dress. The police found the leggings later, in a trash can behind the house where six men lay dead. A house where no one had been safe.
Patty’s fists were clenched so tightly the IV port in the back of her hand stung like a wasp. Not that hand. The other one. The one she could bear to look at.
Why could she remember every detail of that dress and so little else?
Why?
How was that even possible?
There was a soft ping and the cop outside laughed quietly at something that popped up on her screen.
She’s there to make sure I don’t kill myself.
Patty looked up at the reverse star field on the ceiling. After a long time it seemed like the holes really were white dots against an infinity of black. The stars began to move. Slowly at first, then faster, swirling more like sparks.
But by then Patty was asleep, sliding down a long slanted tunnel in the floor of the world, toward a darkness so complete there was not a word for it in any human language.
She was just about to fall forever when there was a sound that pulled her back. Not a voice. Not a scream. Something more mundane. A knock. Then the soft creak of hinges as the door opened.
Patty forced her eyes open, suspicious that this was actually part of some trick of the demons in the dark. She opened her eyes, the merest of slits, afraid that if she saw a monster it would know, and then it would pounce.
A head and shoulders leaned in through the door.
“Ms. Trang?” asked a soft voice.
It was not Tuyet. It was not Monk.
It was a cop.